Microsoft Pay Arrives

Microsoft had a payment platform on Windowsphone 8.x which they announced in 2012. It required the carriers to provide a special secure SIM, that almost no one provided, and buy in from banks.

Fortunately the Nokia devices that were the centre of the Windowsphone eco-system all had NFC and were payment ready.

This was all called Wallet. Apple didn’t even have NFC in their phones.

In Europe, which had “chip and pin” technology since 2003 and where Nokia devices were in double digit sales the retail stores were moving to “tap and pay” pretty quickly. The Olympics in London during 2012 were showcasing at least one British bank’s technology by having NFC payments enabled.

Microsoft introduce “tap and pay” in 2016 in the US Only, only on Lumia 950 and 950XL phones, only on limited banks, following Google and Apple that had already launched globally.

Now they have cleverly renamed their “Microsoft Wallet” as “Microsoft Pay”. You might think this could be a mobile payment technology launch globally perhaps. Although since Windowsphone is now dead that’s probably not the case.

What it seems to be is a sort of Edge browser plugin that uses the recently established web api for making payments. Basically a desktop web helper to store your credit card numbers using a browser with a small share of the market.

I welcome it but Microsoft seem to spend an inordinate amount of time renaming things in a confusing way. Most people in the social media thought “at last mobile payments coming to WIndowsphone outside the USA.

No. Its something to store your credit card in Edge – just like that Windows 98 thing that stored your credit cards for IE but with an internet standard attached.